In "The Limits of Critique," Felski argues that critique has become the very kind of common sense it sets out to expose.
In "The Limits of Critique," Felski argues that critique has become the very kind of common sense it sets out to expose.
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED what literary critics call “literary theory,” “critical theory,” or just plain “theory” in a class titled “Contemporary Literary Theory” taught by what must have been the world’s most patient professor. Each week we studied a different approach to reading, moving from formalism to structuralism to Marxism to feminism to deconstruction to postcolonialism and beyond. Every new theory presented itself as the true method of interpretation, the one that would lead me through the smoke screens and false fronts that obscured the meanings of works of literature, or what I learned to call “texts.” Structuralism was the answer to all possible questions, it seemed, until I learned about Marxism, which was supplanted by feminism and so on. “Now I’ve really got it,” I would think each week, only to be disabused of my former faith when the next theory showed me the true path to meaning. Reading, it turned out, was not simply following the story or argument or imagery. It was a complex process whereby text and context, words and their worlds had to be decoded like hieroglyphs. I came to think of “theory” as a kind of shorthand term for the many different approaches to deciphering these hieroglyphs, and I realized that the world of literary studies I was so eager to join was subdivided into camps. The Marxists wanted to talk about class, while the postcolonialists wanted to talk about empire.
What Rita Felski explains with such insight and clarity in her new book, The Limits of Critique, is that the features that make these theories seem so different from one another are the very things that ground them all in a common ethos, the ethos of critique. Whether she takes a formalist or a queer approach, the critic’s job is to interrogate the text, diagnose its complicity with social forces, rebel against this complicity, and extol the virtues of texts that do this work for us. The authority of critique depends, in part, on its dispassionate tone, its ability to provide the critic with enough distance to identify and interrogate what seems like common sense. If she does not engage in critique, then the critic is thought to be naive, uninterested in politics, or, far worse, a humanist!
Felski argues that critique has become the very kind of common sense it sets out to expose. Her book sets out to show that critique is not coterminous with literary studies, but rather one methodology among many. Although I think she accomplishes this goal in a way that expands the parameters of the discipline, I expect the goal itself to meet with opposition. At a moment when the seeming insularity of literary studies is just one example of the humanities’ steady slide toward oblivion, Felski’s view of critique will be seen by some as a backing-away from the most interdisciplinary, political skill we have. After all, if we don’t engage in “critical thinking,” how will we continue to justify our existence? But Felski’s argument does not do away with critical thinking. Instead, by examining what critique can and cannot do, she rethinks politics altogether and reimagines the contribution literary critics might make to the university and the culture at large.
The Limits of Critique begins by redescribing critique as a literary version of what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” To read suspiciously is to insist that the text’s real meaning always lies hidden. By redefining critique as a hermeneutics of suspicion, Felski demonstrates that it is not an exclusively intellectual enterprise. Instead, critique’s dispassion and detachment mark it as a resolutely emotional endeavor. Taking on the role of the critic has its own affective rewards. The critic is the knowing reader who stands above or beyond the many attachments that prevent the lay reader from being able to see what a text really means. The critic is never naive. The critic is a member of an exclusive club made up of those who are in the know, those who are not bamboozled by the appearances of things. As it turns out, literary critics have practiced a method whose intellectual virtues have often obfuscated its emotional pleasures.
The origins of this argument can be traced back at least a dozen years in Felski’s work. In Literature after Feminism (2003) she tells the story of teaching Henry James’s The Bostonians to a class of college students who missed out on the novel’s sophisticated treatment of gender because of their resistance to its patriarchal values. “They were so eager to impose what they saw as the correct feminist reading on the text,” she recalls, “that they were oblivious to what the text might say back to them.” Felski identifies this commitment to resistance as both a classic feature of feminist interpretation and a prime example of Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The reference to Ricoeur in Literature after Feminism is illuminating but brief, and Felski quickly moves on.
But it seems the resonance between feminist interpretation and the “hermeneutics of suspicion” echoed loudly in her thinking about how theoretical approaches like feminism teach us to read. Within five years of Literature after Feminism, Felski published Uses of Literature (2008), building on the work of Eve Sedgwick and others to argue that suspicion has become the de facto posture of the literary theory classroom and calling for a change: “At this point, we are all resisting readers; perhaps the time has come to resist the automatism of our own resistance, to risk alternate forms of aesthetic engagement.” When I first read Uses of Literature it took me back immediately to that “Contemporary Literary Theory” course and my struggle to understand the diverse range of “theories” in relation to what everyone around me was simply calling “theory.” It helped me start to make sense of why I found the semester’s successive revelations so thrilling and confounding. Uses of Literature takes a step beyond Literature after Feminism, offering four alternatives to suspicious reading: recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock, each outlining a less antagonistic methodology.
What began as an observation about certain brands of feminist interpretation in Literature after Feminism and grew into a revision of literary theory more broadly in Uses of Literature has evolved into an argument about the very horizon of literary studies in The Limits of Critique. The limits of critique are most obvious in the literature classroom, where teachers exhaust themselves in their attempts to help students see that we are not trying to teach them “the answer,” as if there was one. Rather, we are trying to help them see in a certain way, that certain way being, of course, the way we see. It’s not that we want them to come to the same conclusions, but that we want them to learn how to ask the same kinds of questions that we have learned to ask. I’m less concerned (though not unconcerned) with my students’ interpretations of Toni Morrison’s Jazz than I am with their ability to ask the kinds of questions that will produce new insights. They learn to adopt a certain attitude toward the text and the existing criticism of the text, an attitude that primarily values these things for what they don’t say. Students become critics who are looking for a gap to fill, an absence to make present. In this way, critique is a “matter of style, method, and orientation (‘knowing how’ to read a text or pursue a line of reasoning), involving emulation of both tone and technique.”
To be continued...